The following is an editorial by Richard Lessner,
Editor of the Manchester, New Hampshire Union Leader,
12 August 1998
Male Identity Crisis -- Social Engineering Has Produced Killer Kids
By Richard Lessner
The majority of violent crimes are committed by young men between the ages
of 15 and 25. Increasingly, however, we are seeing horrific crimes being
committed by younger and younger boys.
In an Arkansas school yard, little-boy killers dressed in fatigues gun down
their classmates. In Chicago, boys 7 and 8 are accused of murdering an
11-year-old girl for her bicycle. Teachers polled nationwide say that
student violence is the worst problem facing the schools; 40 years ago it
was talking in the classroom.
Here in New Hampshire, we still are trying to make sense of the slaying of
14-year-old Robbie Mills of Laconia, who was murdered, police say, for his
bicycle. An 18-year-old is accused of this senseless crime.
How do we account for the rising numbers of violent children? Doubtless
many factors are at work, but one of the most important may be the crisis
in manliness. Writing in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, Walter
R. Newell, professor of political science at Carlton University in Ottawa,
Canada, details the rising toll we are paying for our foolish experiment in
gender leveling.
For more than 30 years, Professor Newell notes, we have pursued a prolonged
effort at social engineering. The aim has been to eradicate any
psychological or emotional difference between men and women. The rationale
for this vast social experiment has been the radical feminist notion that
any concept of manliness inevitably leads to aggression and violence against
women and rigid hierarchies of power that exclude and marginalize.
Baby Boomers were told not to be hung up on providing distinctly masculine
role models for boys and to de-emphasize differences between the sexes. At
the same time, we have endured the breakdown of the family, rising divorce
rates and, thanks to the misguided sexual revolution, an explosion of
out-of-wedlock births and single mothers.
Many of these un-fathered boys model themselves not after loving, faithful,
hard-working bread winners, but after super-macho male sports figures
fathering children willy-nilly like rooting boars or the violently
misogynist rock stars of MTV.
Un-fathered young men are prone to identify their maleness with violence
and aggression because they have no better models. "It seems plain enough,"
Prof. Newell writes, "that we are missing the boat on manliness; for there
are forms of pride and honor that would be good to impart to males. Indeed,
manly honor, and shame at failing to live up to it, are the surest means of
promoting respect for women."
Though there are always exceptions, the single most powerful predictor of
violent behavior among boys and young men is fatherlessness. Absentee
fathers, researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead finds, is a more important
factor in adolescent crime than poverty, lack of education or minority status.
Boys and girls are different -- physically, hormonally, emotionally. We
need to recover a sense that to be a man means to be "honorable, brave,
self-restrained, zealous in behalf of a good cause, with feelings of
delicacy and respect toward loved ones." So the first step is to recover a
positive tradition of manliness from three decades of feminist stereotyping
that identifies any expression of masculinity with violence, dominance and
aggression.
According to the prevailing orthodoxy, however, there are no differences
between boys and girls; all have exactly the same capacities and ambitions.
Yet as Prof. Newell asserts, all that 30 years of such conditioning have
done is to drive manliness underground and distort it by severing it from
traditional sources of restraint and civility.
In our therapeutic society, moreover, we have psychologized normal male
behavior, what once would have been regarded as boyish high-spiritedness.
The object, however, should not be to suppress such normal male energies --
or medicate them with powerful mood-altering drugs [ritalin, etc] -- but to
channel them into the development of a mature masculine character.
Feminists will shriek, of course, that any effort to restore a traditional
understanding of manliness would be to return to the era of patriarchy and
the oppression of women. In this view, the lives of our parents and
grandparents were hell holes of male aggression. Yet our 30-year social
experiment has succeeded not only in liberating women, but in producing
killer boys. This, it is said, is progress.
Our hubristic effort to undo biology is failing and the history of Western
civilization is not the long nightmare of male oppression of women that the
feminists imagine. Perhaps a more traditional approach to our understanding
of what it means to be male would provide a better foundation of respect
between men and women than the speculative fevers of feminism. And perhaps
the best way to convince boys and young men to treat others with respect is
to raise them in the traditional virtues of manliness.